Sixty Days and Counting. Kim Stanley Robinson
tacked down roughly at the banks. The sight reminded him of Long Pond, and the shock of seeing those men striding across the ice toward them; his pulse jumped, but his hands and feet got colder. The tip of his nose, still a bit numb at the best of times, was even number than usual. He squeezed and tugged it to get some feeling and blood flow.
‘Nose still numb?’
‘Yes.’
Edgardo broke into the song ‘Comfortably Numb’: ‘I – – I, have become, comfortably numb,’ then scat singing the famous guitar solo, ‘Da daaaa, da da da da da-da-daaaaaa,’ exaggerating Gilmour’s bent notes. ‘Okay! Okay, okay, Is there anybody in there?’ Abruptly he broke off. ‘Well, I will go talk to my friend whom you met. He’s into this stuff and he has an interest. His group is still looking at the election problem, for sure.’
‘Do you think I could meet him again? To explore some strategies?’ And ask a bunch of questions, he didn’t say.
‘Maybe. Let me talk to him. It may be pointless to meet. It depends. I’ll check. Meanwhile you should try your other options.’
‘I don’t know that I have any.’
‘Are you still having trouble making decisions?’
‘Yes.’
‘Go see your doctor, then.’
‘I did! I mean, I’ve got an appointment. The time has almost come.’
Edgardo laughed.
‘Please,’ Frank said. ‘I’m trying. I made the call.’
But in fact, when the time came for his doctor’s appointment, he went in unhappily. Surely, he thought obstinately, deciding to go to the doctor meant he was well enough to decide things!
So he felt ridiculous as he described the problem to the doctor, a young guy who was looking rather dubious. Frank felt his account was sketchy at best, as he very seldom tasted blood at the back of his throat anymore. But he could not complain merely of feeling indecisive, so he emphasized the tasting a little more than the most recent data would truly support, which made him feel even more foolish. He hated visiting the doctor at any time, so why was he there just to exaggerate an occasional symptom? Maybe his decision-making capability was damaged after all! Which meant it was good to have come in. And yet here he was making things up. Although he was only trying to physicalize the problem, he told himself. To describe real symptoms.
In any case, the doctor offered no opinion, but only gave him a referral to an ear nose and throat guy. It was the same one Frank had seen immediately after his accident. Frank steeled himself, called again (two decisions?) and found that here the next appointment available was a month away. Happily he wrote down the date and forgot about it.
Or would have; except now he was cast back into the daily reality of struggling to figure out what to do. Hoping every morning that Emerson or Thoreau would tell him. So he didn’t really forget about the appointment, but it was scheduled and he didn’t have to go for a long time, so he could be happy. Happy until the next faint taste of old blood slid down the back of his throat, like the bitterness of fear itself, and he would check and see the day was getting nearer with a mix of relief and dread.
Once he noticed the date when talking with Anna, because she said something about not making it through the winter in terms of several necessary commodities that people had taken to hoarding. She had gotten into studying hoarding in the social science literature. Hoarding, Anna said, represented a breakdown in the social contract which even their economy’s capacity for over-production in many items could not compensate for.
‘It’s another case of prisoner’s dilemma,’ Frank said. ‘Everyone’s choosing the “always defect” option as being the safest. Or the one in which you rely least on others.’
‘Maybe.’
Anna was not one for analogies. She was as literal-minded a person as Frank had ever met; it was always good to remember that she had started her scientific training as a chemist. Metaphors bounced off her like spears off bulletproof glass. If she wanted to understand hoarding, then she googled ‘hoarding,’ and when she saw links to mathematical studies of the economics and social dynamics of ‘hoarding in shortage societies,’ those were the ones she clicked on, even if they tended to be old work from the socialist and post-socialist literature. Those studies had had a lot of data to work with, sadly, and she found their modeling interesting, and spoke to Frank of things like choice rubrics in variable information states, which she thought he might be able to formalize as algorithms.
‘It’s called “always defect,”’ Frank insisted.
‘Okay, but then look at what that leads to.’
‘All right.’
Clearly Anna was incensed at how unreasonable people were being. To her it was a matter of being rational, of being logical. ‘Why don’t they just do the math?’ she demanded.
A rhetorical question, Frank judged. Though he wished he could answer it, rhetorically or not, in a way that did not depress him. His investigations into cognition studies were not exactly encouraging. Logic was to cognition as geometry was to landscape.
After this conversation, Frank recalled her saying ‘end of the winter’ as if that were near, and he checked his desk calendar – the date circled for his ENT appointment was circled there, and not too far away – and suddenly he realized that in America, when it came to health care, the most important product of them all, they always operated in a shortage society.
In any case, he went to the doctor when the day came. Ear nose and throat – but what about brain? He read Walden in the waiting room, was ushered into an examination room to wait and read some more, then five minutes of questions and inspections, and the diagnosis was made: he needed to see another specialist. A neurologist, in fact, who would have to take a look at some scans, possibly CT, PET, SPECT, MRI; the brain guy would make the calls. The ENT guy would give him a referral, he said, and Frank would have to see where they could fit him in. Scans; the reading and analysis of the brain guy; then perhaps a re-examination by the ENT. How long would it all take? Try it and see. They hurried things up in scheduling when there were questions about the brain, but only so much could be done; there were a lot of other people out there with equally serious problems, or worse ones.
So, Frank thought as he went back to work in his office. You could buy DVD players for thirty dollars and flat-screen TVs for a hundred, also a million other consumer items that would help you to experience vicariously the lives that your work and wages did not give you to live (that T-shirt seen on Connecticut Avenue, ‘Medieval Peasants Worked Less Than You Do’) – everything was cheap, in overproduction – except you lived in a permanent shortage of doctors, artificially maintained. Despite the high cost of medical insurance (if you could get it) you had to wait weeks or months on tests to find out how your bodies were sick or injured, when such events befell you. Even though it was possible to measure statistically how much health care a given population was going to need, and provide it accordingly.
But there was nothing for it but to think about other things, when he could; and when not, to bide his time and try to work, like everyone else.
It had been every kind of winter so far, warmer, drier, stormier, colder. Bad for agriculture, but good for conversation. In the first week of March, a cold front swept south and knocked them back into full winter lockdown, the river frozen, the city frozen, every Metro vent steaming frost, which then froze and fell to the ground as white dust. The whole city was frosted, and with all the steam curling out of the ground, looked as if it had been built atop a giant hot springs. When the sun came out everything glittered whitely, then prismatically when the melting began, then went gray when low stratus clouds obscured the sun.
For Frank this was another ascent into what he thought of as high latitude or high altitude: a return to the high country one way or another, because weather was landscape, in that however the land lay underfoot, it was the weather that gave you a sense of where you were.
If